Government Shut Down

BOREF

If you have an hour and some, here’s WheelTug’s recent presentation to the Toulouse branch of the Royal Aeronautical Society (which is to say Airbus), complete with more than half an hour of q&a from a sophisticated aircraft crowd. Judge for yourself, but we seem to have come a long way toward making this real. It baffles me why, at this stage, parent Borealis is still valued at only $60 million but Patience is my middle name. (Or P is my middle initial, at any rate.)

NKTR

Those of you who get this by email don’t see the updates I often make minutes or hours later. Usually, I just correct typos. (Thanks to those of you who catch them!) Once in a while, I make a more substantive change. Friday, I added an update on NKTR, which had just dropped sharply. In case you own it, you might want to go back and take a look.

A KEY THING TO KNOW ABOUT OBAMACARE

When Republicans tell you that a majority of Americans don’t like it, they don’t mention that when you adjust for those who don’t like it because it doesn’t go far enough*it turns out that a majority of Americans do favor Obamacare. And yet the Republicans are dead set against it.

Obamacare increases virtually everyone’s health care security, improves the health of the citizenry and improves the health of the economy . . . all achieved through increased efficiencies and incentives and through — most tangibly — a shift of several tens of billions of dollars a year from wealthy investors to the working poor and middle class. (Wealthy investors will pay an extra $380,000 on each $10 million in dividends and capital gains they earn — though still less than they were paying under Ronald Reagan.) (And yes, if you make only $300,000 a year — which after deductions and exemptions, let’s say, leaves you with $250,000 in taxable income — even you will pay $380 more on each additional $10,000 of capital gains or dividends you might earn. But it’s really not the end of the world, even for you.)

*Quite rightly, they would prefer a single-payer system of the type all the other advanced nations of the world have.

KENTUCKY

By STEVE BESHEAR

FRANKFORT, Ky. — SUNDAY morning news programs identify Kentucky as the red state with two high-profile Republican senators who claim their rhetoric represents an electorate that gave President Obama only about a third of its presidential vote in 2012.So why then is Kentucky — more quickly than almost any other state — moving to implement the Affordable Care Act?

Because there’s a huge disconnect between the rank partisanship of national politics and the outlook of governors whose job it is to help beleaguered families, strengthen work forces, attract companies and create a balanced budget.

It’s no coincidence that numerous governors — not just Democrats like me but also Republicans like Jan Brewer of Arizona, John Kasich of Ohio and Rick Snyder of Michigan — see the Affordable Care Act not as a referendum on President Obama but as a tool for historic change.

That is especially true in Kentucky, a state where residents’ collective health has long been horrendous. The state ranks among the worst, if not the worst, in almost every major health category, including smoking, cancer deaths, preventable hospitalizations, premature death, heart disease and diabetes.

We’re making progress, but incremental improvements are not enough. We need big solutions with the potential for transformational change.

The Affordable Care Act is one of those solutions.

For the first time, we will make affordable health insurance available to every single citizen in the state. Right now, 640,000 people in Kentucky are uninsured. That’s almost one in six Kentuckians.

Lack of health coverage puts their health and financial security at risk.

They roll the dice and pray they don’t get sick. They choose between food and medicine. They ignore checkups that would catch serious conditions early. They put off doctor’s appointments, hoping a condition turns out to be nothing. And they live knowing that bankruptcy is just one bad diagnosis away.

Furthermore, their children go long periods without checkups that focus on immunizations, preventive care and vision and hearing tests. If they have diabetes, asthma or infected gums, their conditions remain untreated and unchecked.

For Kentucky as a whole, the negative impact is similar but larger — jacked-up costs, decreased worker productivity, lower quality of life, depressed school attendance and a poor image.

The Affordable Care Act will address these weaknesses.

Some 308,000 of Kentucky’s uninsured — mostly the working poor — will be covered when we increase Medicaid eligibility guidelines to 138 percent of the federal poverty level.

PricewaterhouseCoopers and the Urban Studies Institute at the University of Louisville concluded that expanding Medicaid would inject $15.6 billion into Kentucky’s economy over the next eight years, create almost 17,000 new jobs, have an $802.4 million positive budget impact (by transferring certain expenditures from the state to the federal government, among other things), protect hospitals from cuts in indigent care funding and shield businesses from up to $48 million in annual penalties.

In short, we couldn’t afford not to do it.

The other 332,000 uninsured Kentuckians will be able to access affordable coverage — most with a discount — through the Health Benefit Exchange, the online insurance marketplace we named Kynect: Kentucky’s Healthcare Connection.

Kentucky is the only Southern state both expanding Medicaid and operating a state-based exchange, and we remain on target to meet the Oct. 1 deadline to open Kynect with the support of a call center that is providing some 100 jobs. Having been the first state-based exchange to complete the readiness review with the United States Department of Health and Human Services, we hope to become the first one to be certified.

Frankly, we can’t implement the Affordable Care Act fast enough.

As for naysayers, I’m offended by their partisan gamesmanship, as they continue to pour time, money and energy into overturning or defunding the Affordable Care Act. It’s shameful that these critics haven’t invested that same level of energy into trying to improve the health of our citizens.

They insist that the Affordable Care Act will never work — when in fact a similar approach put into effect in Massachusetts by Mitt Romney, then the governor, is working.

So, to those more worried about political power than Kentucky’s families, I say, “Get over it.”

The Affordable Care Act was approved by Congress and sanctioned by the Supreme Court. It is the law of the land.

Get over it … and get out of the way so I can help my people. Here in Kentucky, we cannot afford to waste another day or another life.

GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN

Yep: the Republicans are shutting it down. It’s that important to them to try to keep the middle class and working poor from having health care security, and to keep preventive care from being free.

That’s OK. At some point in the next 18 days Speaker Boehner will waive the “Hastert rule” and allow the House to vote on raising the debt limit (and starting the government back up again), even though it may cost him his speakership. No one who cries as freely as he does, and is as basically a simple, decent man as he is, would allow the global economy to collapse just to retain his gavel. Even the Koch brothers (and certainly the Wall Street Journal) are urging the House to raise the debt limit (i.e., pay its bills) and stop this insanity.

The markets, barely fazed, seem to have high confidence we will not needlessly self-destruct and I think they’re right. I sure hope so!

But to have taken it even this far — and to have fought so hard these past five years to obstruct the things that so clearly need doing (like putting people to work repairing our crumbling national infrastructure) is little short of tragic. As were the Bush years that led us into unnecessary war and wrecked our national balance sheet.